Image: Fletcher Prince via Flickr

Do you have “Gravitas, confidence and the ability to build relationships and credibility…”?

Are you interested in building the “credibility and authority” of a major brewer as “a contributor to the debate on the role of the brewing industry in managing irresponsible alcohol consumption”?

Would you like a position where you manage the “repercussions to the industry” of the “ongoing alcohol debate”?

And would you like to do this without actually reducing alcohol problems?

If so, then this job is for you!

The following is cross-posted from the Faith In Action newsletter from the General Board of Church & Society of the United Methodist Church:

A great deal of public health research over the past few decades has pointed to the value of control policies in limiting alcohol-related problems. These policies include increasing the price of alcohol, limiting the concentration of outlets, limiting hours and days of sale, enhanced enforcement of underage drinking laws, and others.

And yet, despite the confirmed value of these policy solutions, they are rarely put into practice. Bringing about lasting change is far from easy, due mainly to political resistance from those with a financial stake in keeping things as they are: the alcohol industry and its allies.

The full article is available here

Photo: AllisonKo via Flickr

The forces working to deregulate state alcohol control systems (alcohol producers, big retailers, and their allies) are careful to deemphasize that their business models depend on overall increases in alcohol consumption, which invariably lead to increases in death, disease, and other social problems.

Thus, efforts to expand hours and days of sale of alcohol are presented as modern business practices (increased “convenience”) vs. “archaic,” “Prohibition-era” blue laws. Sadly, many journalists covering these issues are less than diligent and simply follow the industry frame of modern business vs. religion. There is a nary a mention of the public health impacts of such deregulation, despite the fact that the Task for Community Preventive Services has found that increasing hours or days of sale leads to a host of problems, including increases in alcohol-related traffic accidents.

Occasionally, however, reality pokes through, as in an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the dubious benefits of Sunday sales in Georgia:

Jay Hibbard, vice president of government relations for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, said that overall those are positive results. Counting on more impulse buys, his organization predicts Sunday sales will increase statewide liquor taxes by 5 percent to 7 percent, translating to an additional $3.4 million to $4.8 million.  [emphasis mine]

Do we as a nation really want to facilitate the “impulse buying” of hard liquor, or any alcohol for that matter?  Should alcohol be treated like chewing gum at a supermarket checkout aisle?  Not if we value the health and safety of our communities.

Wrongly, perilously, we tend not to attribute the same destructive powers to it that we do to powders, capsules and vials … Because drinking is legal for adults, safe in moderation, the rightful font of epicurean reveries and the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry with lobbyists galore, it gets something of a pass. Many of us like it — no, love it — too much to survey the damage it can do, look at ways in which our society could work to curb that and acknowledge that the effort isn’t so very vigorous.

What’s more, as the former restaurant critic for the Times, Bruni can’t be brushed aside as a neo-Prohibitionist by the alcohol industry PR machine.

Bruni’s full piece  is available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/opinion/sunday/bruni-whitney-houston-and-alcohols-toll.html

Three points that particularly stand out:

1) Forget the stereotypes:  Binge drinking is not a “poor person’s problem”

The income group containing the most binge drinkers, at 20.2 percent, is those whose annual income is more than $75,000. However, the income group that binge drinking affects most often is those who make less than $25,000 a year.

This means that the contention made by alcohol interests and their allies – that alcohol taxes are unfairly regressive – is neither accurate nor honest.  Wealthier people are more likely to binge drink, while low-income people are often forced to bear the brunt of alcohol-related harm due to the concentration of alcohol outlets in the most deprived neighborhoods and other factors.

2) The data demand a closer look

Although New York State wasn’t recognized as one of the highest states in terms of percentage of adults who binge drink, it doesn’t mean it’s not a problem here. The CDC study identifies a percentage ranging from 18.7 percent to 25.6 percent as having the highest proportion of binge drinkers per state. A study by Excellus BlueCross BlueShield found that the Western New York region has about a 22 percent binge drinking rate. When comparing the CDC data to the data here in Western New York, we would fall under the ‘high binge drinking’ category.

If we look only at NYS averages we miss the fact that some areas – most notably large swaths of Western NY and the North Country – are closer to high-binge states (such as those in New England and the Upper Midwest) in their binge drinking rates.

3) It’s time for full-cost accounting on alcohol

Binge drinking, or drinking at all, might not seem like a problem or cause for concern to many people, but when data suggests that each year 80,000 Americans die because of alcohol, or that that drinking costs an already-suffering economy $223.5 billion, we all should be concerned.

Many times our notions of economic development are short-sighted at best, self-defeating at worst.  Unless we carefully analyze the health impacts of our policy decisions, we actually risk making the economic conditions of our neighborhoods worse.  Considering the role of excessive alcohol consumption in chronic diseases and admissions to Level-1 Trauma centers, and the burden of Medicaid costs on state and county budgets, we can’t afford get-rich-quick schemes which threaten the health and safety of our communities.

Wisconsin Senate Bill 358  takes that approach to its ridiculous extreme by allowing alcohol beverage licensees to sue parents of kids under 18 who procure alcohol in their establishments.  The licensee would be entitled to $1,000 (plus costs and “reasonable” attorney fees) which is actually more than the fine ($500) the state levies against those who sell to minors.

If the sponsors of this bill really want to tackle underage drinking, they should increase the price of alcohol and investigate the alcohol industry’s practices of luring kids with products like marshmallow-flavored vodka and saturating kids with digital alcohol marketing.   But, then again, that might not go over well with their buddies at the Tavern League of Wisconsin.

Reference:

Mosher, J. F. (1995). The merchants, not the customers: resisting the alcohol and tobacco industries’ strategy to blame young people for illegal alcohol and tobacco sales. Journal of Public Health Policy, 16(4), 412-432.

The companies see alcoholic beverages as a growth opportunity after years of flat sales, said David Henkes, a vice president with the Chicago-based food research firm Technomic. “Alcohol is one of those things that is extremely profitable to the operator,” he said.

Just one more example of the erosion of the firewall between a well-regulated alcohol control system, and a pathogenic culture of nearly unlimited access and availability.  Add it to the list of  alcohol-serving movie theaters, laundromat/bar combos, and kiddie restaurants that serve just enough alcohol to trigger grown-up violence.

Brochure available here.

According to the Sourcewatch site for the Center for Media and Democracy, alcohol companies which have been involved with ALEC include Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller.  Currently, Diageo’s Vice President of Government and Trade Relations, Kenneth Lane, sits on the ALEC Private Enterprise Board.

Diageo, like many other major alcohol producers, publicly celebrates “diversity” with its employee resource groups like the African Heritage Employees at Diageo (A.H.E.A.D.) and the [GLBT] Rainbow Network.  Yet, in light of Diageo’s affiliation with anti-democratic groups like ALEC, this embrace of diversity appears to be just another tactic to soften up target markets.

To The Editor:

David White’s call for deregulation of our alcohol control system (“Wholesale Robbery…,” 4/4) is telling for its comparison of direct shipping of alcohol to that for books and shoes.  In truth, as the World Health Organization has stated, alcohol is “no ordinary commodity” and thus cannot be treated like a pair of Manolo Blahnik pumps or a Patricia Cornwell paperback.  We are, after all, talking about the third leading root cause of death in the US and the leading preventable cause of birth defects and intellectual disabilities.

In fact, the three-tier system of alcohol distribution was put in place precisely because of this product’s special nature.  But the powerful multinational corporations who dominate alcohol production (conveniently omitted from Mr. White’s narrative) and their retail allies will brook no limit on profits, and work feverishly to deregulate our alcohol control systems through litigation and lobbying.

We need to remember this before we drink Mr. White’s deregulation kool-aid.

Robert S. Pezzolesi, MPH
New York Center for Alcohol Policy Solutions

Complicating the picture is the fact that the Times is in the online wine business through the New York Times Wine Club.